They're also holding a Hack-for-Change hackathon in June ( http://hackforchange.org/hack-change-tampa ) -- Tampa and Hillsborough are definitely working to push growth of the technology center and open data within the tri-county area.

If anyone can pulls an alert from a public domain torrent, please post the link. I'd really like to get my 5 alerts out of the way this weekend so I can speak with the CAS team about how utterly useless they, and their entire scheme, are before my account cancels.

Well, if they overbook the flight too much and no one will take their offers, the airline's involuntarily deny passengers entry and hand them a form detailing 14 USC 250.9 ( link ). The law is a protectionary measure that says, any airline can break our contract with you at any time by handing you a maximum of $200.00 and finding you an alternative flight within 2 hours of your flight, or by handing you $400.00 and telling you to piss off. Though, you can refuse the payment, and opt to sue them in court.

Of course, airlines loathe paying any money back, so they offer you the free flights instead. All-in-all I guess the law works decently well, but I can assure you getting one of those forms and being told your next flight will be available in 8 hours after a red-eye flight from California is not a fun experience. Though, here's a tip, tell them you're refusing the payment and opting to seek compensation in court while booking the first available last-minute ticket on whatever airline is leaving next. In my case, they, amazingly, found me a seat.

Don't forget that if they'd simply bothered to show up to the ex-parte hearing, Samsung could have easily informed the court that the camera man had made such a terrible mistake. So, clearly, it's their fault.

Roughly 10 years ago, I was war-driving and one of the hotspots came up: 'CIA SAFE HOUSE'. The sad part was, I wasn't sure if it was a joke or if someone was actually that daft. It was a posh area of town, so I'm still undecided to this day.

I'm sure you were trying to be funny, but I'd hope that both Google and Oracle would have had enough brains to bring in qualified attorneys.

I'm a full-time appellate attorney and co-founder of the Azureus Bit-Torrent client (written in Java, but don't blame me for Vuze -- I left the project long before then). I've taught classes on computer security and advanced programming at 4-year universities. I also speak around the country on both legal and security topics (DefCon, Shmoocon, ToorCamp, and various legal-bar events etc.). I've spoken on anything from constitutional issues, intellectual property, contracts law, reverse engineering, code design, etc. Actually, the latest talks I'm working on are on advanced techniques with Python bytecode. So, yes, while most attorneys would have a hard time explaining these topics to judges, not all of them would and I'm hopeful that the judge was presented with competent people.

And, yes, I've had to explain computer topics to both attorneys and judges -- they understood them. Conversely, I've had to explain legal topics to software engineers -- they also understood them. It's really not that difficult, and you'd be amazed at how similar some of the concepts really are.

Or maybe they got the idea from Tennessee, who has had this on the books for a number of years? See Tenn. Statutes: 39-14-602(b)(1):

Accesses any computer, computer system, or computer network commits a Class C misdemeanor. Operating a computer network in such a way as to allow anonymous access to that network shall constitute implicit consent to access under this part

There seems to be a slight conflict of interest here (slight might be the wrong word). Honestly, isn't this encouraging the companies producing these machines to intentionally include bugs in their code? Your code is filled with bugs, we'd like to procure your services:

You're dead wrong (see: Transocean's limitation of liability filing). There is a little known clause, outside of admiralty law practitioners, that allows parties to limit their liability to the value of the vessel after the wreck. For reference, that generally isn't a low of money and it appears from their filing that it's roughly $26M. They are correct that it doesn't protect claims from the Oil Pollution Act but I'd wonder how many incidentals that'll apply to.

So, yes, yes, Transocean and BP, as a successor to liability, are actively working to limit to the claims as much as possible. I won't speculate on the outcome but I'll throw in that I'm glad I never did buy property on the Gulf side of Florida.

IAAL and here's a presentation I gave at ShmooCon and DefCon last year entitled "They Took My Laptop! - 4th and 5th Amendment Explained." The Defcon video isn't available yet, unfortunately, since the content is more up to date. The video goes into a decent amount of depth on the current body of laws in regards to laptop seizures. Anyway, thought it might be of use.

It's known as a long arm jurisdiction ( link ). Generally, the test is if the entity had sufficient contact with the jurisdiction. In this case I would guess it was based on the fact that the website was reachable, and more importantly, foreseeably reachable by American (Californian) citizens.

Or jurisdiction may have been waived. I didn't bother to pull the filings off PACER --sorry.